I have two friends, now married, who grew up a stone’s throw from each other in working class, Catholic families in Glasgow’s east end in the 1960s and 70s. Their childhood experiences are achingly familiar, remembered with dark, gallus humour; masking the very real pain of a life where alcoholism, joblessness and time served in jail were all too common realities of everyday life.
In Douglas Stuart’s Man Booker Prize winning debut novel, he quips that “Big Shug Bain seems so shiny in comparison to the Catholics”, a line that strikes at the reality of the fault lines that existed in Scotland’s biggest city. It calls to memory an anecdote from my friends, who had admitted at a dinner party that neither of them could swim, to which their youngest daughter, aged seven, asked, “Mummy, why can’t Catholics swim?”.
